Bandit.

Inspiration

As university students, we are often buying textbooks and other items online. However, we found that the site that we bought the majority of our items, Amazon, didn't always have the lowest prices. So we wanted to create an chrome extension to help users find great deals to save money.

What it does

Bandit is a Chrome extension that allows Amazon customers to easily compare product price that retailers are selling for vs what users are reselling for on eBay. It does this by displaying a dropdown showing the price of the item in the extension. For more information, the user can click the extension and it will bring them to the eBay page.

How we built it

Used react for all the front-end components (displaying items)

Selenium, Node.js, Express, RapidAPI (back-end/scraping)

Challenges we ran into

At first we had troubles figuring out how we would scrape contents from Amazon and integrate it with eBay API but later solved it.

Our main issue currently is working on the runtime of loading in eBay API into our client to display to users. It is currently not loading on the page as fast as we like but are actively working towards a solution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were given a task with a short deadline and were able learn/implement new tools to create a functioning chrome extension which met the users need.

What we learned

Throughout the project, we learned how to work collaboratively as a team. This was essential in the success of the project as we helped each other in our tasks to ensure they would be completed before the short deadline. Furthermore, we developed our project management skills as we worked to complete the project. We were able to do this by managing the tasks to be completed and divided up the roles in order to be efficient given our timeframe.

What's next for Bandit.

We have a few features that we would like to add to Bandit in the future to improve the users experience. These features would be primarily based around accessibility, to be inclusive for all users. To highlight, we have chosen three that we believe are most important. The first feature would be a help button in our extension that would provide the user with information about how to use Bandit. Next, we will add a font size slider to allow the user to adjust the text size based on their needs, this addition would help those who may have difficulty reading. Finally, we will add a toggle for light and dark mode, which allows the user to switch the visuals of the extension based on their preferences.